I have the screen saver active.. I've noticed that when viewing a light background such as Programs or Settings, I can see ghost images of 07/18/08 throughout the screen. They are burnt-in from the screen saver.

I'm familiar with image persistance or "stuck" pixels. It is not the same as actual burn-in.

With the exception of monitors that have/had EXTREMELY soft plastic (where it would literally melt the image in the screen), LCD's aren't really damaged by leaving the same image up all the time.

The company where I work, in the operations center we have 12 full sized LCD screen TV/Monitors. Not a single one has image persistance after nearly a year of displaying the same image. Some of them quite literally display the same image, they only change when something breaks or goes down (rare). Some are changed slightly periodically, but elements of the screen still remain the same.

All 12 monitors run 24/7/365.

Finally, as long as you don't have an extremely cheap monitor/LCD, you can nearly always recover form image persistance. In fact, the first three links (only ones I looked at) all tell you how to fix it. For CRT's the "fix was two steps:

1) Throw away your old CRT
2) Buy a new one

Image persistance (which is what you experienced, my guess would be that your device locked up for an extended period of time with the screen saver stuck on) and burn in are quite different.

Okay you guys are arguing on a technicality. Refer back to my post above where I said I'm switching it off to have the LCD recover.

Not a burn-in in the CRT sense but a burn-in in the LCD sense.. We'll see how my screen recovers..

The company where I work, in the operations center we have 12 full sized LCD screen TV/Monitors. Not a single one has image persistance after nearly a year of displaying the same image. Some of them quite literally display the same image, they only change when something breaks or goes down (rare). Some are changed slightly periodically, but elements of the screen still remain the same.

All 12 monitors run 24/7/365.

The Dell LCD I've seen have images burnt-in in similar amount of time.